Manzarayumedehanai
by Suburban Slasher
Summary: Gojyo and Hakkai discuss scars. Contains spoilers for season 1 and for Requiem, rated for GojyoxHakkai shounenai and for language.


Manzarayumedehanai

by Princess of Pain

~NOTES: The title looks like a line of garbage, I know. According to the site I get my Japanese from, it means "not altogether a dream". ^^;

Anyhow, yes. Went on a quest to find Gojyo/Hakkai fics, and was surprised to find how little there actually is. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but Sanzo/Hakkai, Sanzo/Gojyo and Gojyo/Goku all seem to outnumber G/H. And like I said, I was surprised. Other than Sanzo/Goku, they seemed the most obvious of the possible yaoi pairings... and no one was taking blatant, rampant advantage of it? Egads.

So I wrote a fic. Standard angsty/fluffy/comedic fare, I suppose. Though if you haven't seen "Requiem"--that's the movie that takes place after the first season--this will spoil you/make no sense. You've been warned. As another incidental warning, the names Gojyo gives the demon-king and the half-youkai chick are the Chinese equivalents, since I saw the Hong Kong DVD, and not the Japanese ones. I've no idea what their actual names are. Sorry. Standard fic disclaimer applies.~

_You are my blood.  
_-Dirk, "Weetzie Bat"

When I open my eyes, all I can feel is confusion and his arms around me. The latter makes it even more unreal--this night. We're close, painfully so, but not _that_ close. There's always something between us, one of his chi-barriers, I guess, made up of his past and his fear. I've got one too, to be fair, made of the same ingredients. But as I wake up, it feels like the barrier has lowered... or maybe it has popped.

Hakkai's voice is beautiful, especially when it whispers nothing-words meant to hypnotize and comfort directly into your ear. He also has amazing hands, which are stroking my back soothingly, like I'm a spooked kitten or something. And I feel a lot like that--like my nerves are a string of tin cans tied to my tail. I'm shuddering--why am I shuddering?--and a whining noise is in my throat, like a scream got trapped in my voice box and died.

OK, Gojyo. Inventory time. Bed. I'm in a bed. Most likely the hotel bed I fell asleep in, barring divine intervention (wouldn't put it past the bitch) or teleportation into the Twilight Zone. Sanzo and Goku should therefore be in the room to the left of ours, behind the wall the headboard of my bed is resting against. Hakkai looks worried, not in pain or freaked out, which means that something's wrong with me and not him. But I don't seem to be missing any vital body parts. Last checkup I had, I didn't have any fatal diseases. There's no sign of a youkai attack, or any outside influences. And I don't remember dreaming.

Then why am I shaking...?

"H... Hakkai?"

Jesus, my voice sounds like hell. Cracks so badly I can barely say his name. Was I screaming? I must have been having one horrific nightmare, or one of the hottest wet dreams in existence.

"Are you all right?" He sounds so afraid. Long, gentle fingers cup my face, leading me to look at him dead on. His eyes--forests, emeralds, health, life--are searching for my answer. One is duller than the other, and I know it can't see me as anything but a peach-blood blur.

"Fine." I smile. What a crock of shit. I don't know why I'm lying. Trying to BS Hakkai is like trying to backstab the Devil... you can never get a player at his own game.

"Uh-huh." He lets me go (damn) and stands up, going to the bathroom. I can hear the sound of running water. Well, here's an unexpected punishment for fudging the truth... he let me go. C'mon, man. Once I figure out what I dreamed, I'll tell you. Just hold me till then.

...I sound like a schoolgirl. Maybe I should get up, go to the next room over, snatch Sanzo's gun, and shoot myself out of pity.

He comes back with a paper cup filled with water. He hands it to me and sits back on my bed without a word. Wonderful. Something to cool the monstrous rawness of my throat. I look at his bed as I drink. It's as perfectly made and turned down at God Knows What O'Clock as it was this afternoon, when we got here. It doesn't surprise me.

My eyes shift to him. He's not wearing his monocle. That's weird. I didn't notice till now, and besides, I haven't seen him without it since he got the thing years ago. He's also down to his pants in the clothes department. He was probably just getting ready for bed. Pale moonlight creeps over him from the windows, dividing his skin neatly into silver rectangular tattoos. There are drops of water clinging to the windowpanes that dimple the light on his skin.

No wonder he's still up. It was raining.

"What did you dream?"

"I..." I crush the paper cup and drop it on the floor. I want a cigarette. He glares at the paper ball, and I know I must look bemused. Hakkai always was the matronly type--pick up this room, I just cleaned it, that sort of thing.

Maybe that's why it hurt so much when--

--when--

"_Gojyo!_"

Everything's tilting and going gray. Warm, muscled arms catch me mid-swoon, support me more than their owner knows. If he had any idea... at least he's holding me again.

I blink. Everything clears. My head's resting against his chest. His heartbeat sounds as steady and regular as the ocean, like it pumped the blood of a god. I could listen to it forever.

"My... nightmare."

Silence... but not quite. I can hear him listening.

I absently run my fingers over my belly. "Remember... the castle of illusions? The Crazy Demon King's lair?"

Softly, "Yes."

"The duplicates..."

"Yes, I know."

"Penglan..." My voice cracks and almost severs. "She... she tried to kill me."

Silence.

"At his behest, of course. But she did. Stabbed me good and hard in the wrist. Then she gave up. It was nothing fatal. Then she told me... well, hell. She said every last thing I want to say, and not lie. Her parents loved her. Wanted her. And, I don't know, I thought maybe--"

"...that if you slept with her, you'd be like her," he says, so cool and logical. "And the shock of meeting another fully-grown half-youkai just made it more emotional for you."

How does he DO that?! "Yeah. I think so. But nothing happened."

"Why not?"

"You walked in."

I've lost him. "I think I'd remember--"

"Shut up and let me finish." I've never talked to him like that before, have I? "You walked in. The two of us were talking, like always, so casual. And... you..."

My fingers creep under my A-shirt again. I don't like going shirtless much anymore. I pull it up, just enough so that he can see the ugly, twisted scar that lies across my stomach like a demonic snake. Dark green eyes widen as things click together in his head so loud I can practically hear it.

"You tried to kill me," I said. "Almost did. And I lay there on the floor, bleeding like a goddam pig with my guts getting ready to jump in my lap... and I wished I was dead. I didn't want to live. Because I knew I'd done something else wrong, and I'd fucked it up with you. I knew I was never going to make up for it. I thought, I don't know, that I'd managed to finally give you too many nightmares to deal with. That I was too much of a reminder of your past. Because I look like blood."

I'm babbling. I'm not making sense. I think.

"I thought that you thought I was hopeless. That I _was_ the past, and I was never going to change because of it. That me just being here, just being me, would always remind you of Kanan. And that it had made you snap. I don't know. I didn't have a lot of blood in my body at the time, I wasn't that rational. But Penglan didn't let me die. She taped me back together and hid me from her master. So later... when I saw you... I nearly died again. I was terrified of you and what you were going to do... and then I realized my own damnfool mistake. Not only did you have no idea about my wounds--though you could've always been lying--but Hakuryuu was with you. Jeepu, rather. And even if I wasn't smart enough to know that the thing gutting me wasn't you, I figured it would know."

He's smiling. This doesn't surprise me. "What if Jeepu had been another illusion?"

"Didn't think of it. I did say I'm not too bright, didn't I?" I laugh. It sounds empty. At least we're even, then. "So there you have it. The second worst experience of my life. So I have nightmares about it. A lot. Nightmares happen. You should know."

"I do. I live in one." Long, long, long, long pause. "Why didn't you tell me about this...?"

"Well, what the hell is there to tell? I had a near-death experience. Happens all the time with you yahoos."

He reaches out, touches my hands, forces me to lower my shirt over the scar. "Do you have nightmares about them, too?"

"No."

Something behind his smile changes. "We're always like this, aren't we, Gojyo?"

"...What do you mean?"

"Just... us, I mean. We're all bound up in each other's pasts, not just our own. Your hair and eyes... used to make me think of Kanan. And at first, that was fine. I loved to look at you, because you reminded me of the reason why I stayed alive. I became what I hated, but I could look at you and think of her, and everything would be fine."

And I thought I was getting into deep, dark mental waters. I keep my fool trap shut, for once.

"Then..." He hesitates for a long time, studying the ever-so-plain floor. He looks so fine, all dressed in the moon and in his pain. Oh, fuck me. He's making me a poet. "Then I hated you."

Not what I was expecting to hear. My eyes--eyes which mean something different to everyone who looks in 'em--are widening. They must be as big as dinner plates. If I'd been smoking, the cigarette would have surely dropped from my lips and given my lap a good burn. "You... what did I do now?"

Hakkai laughs--empty, like his normal smile. "You did nothing. It wasn't you. And at the same time, it was. It was what you had come to represent in my mind... looking at you reminded me of my pain. It spoke of what a waste I was. I, who couldn't save his own love. I, a depraved killer. I could see nothing redeeming in myself when I looked at you, and I hated you for it.

"I didn't realize why until much later. Recently, in fact. When that entire town turned against you for being what you are."

Ouch. Hakkai, you're the only being on this ball of mud who can cause me this much pain, and somehow, I let you continue to live.

"I saw the way they loathed you, simply because of red hair and red eyes. Because of things you couldn't help. And because of an incident that had nothing to do with you, that happened a long time before you ever showed up at that place. You were a symbol of everything they despised. And I realized that that was what I'd turned you into: an icon for my hate. Hate which, if it was going to be directed at anything, should have been aimed at myself.

"But I'd stopped hating you a long time beforehand. And I don't know when it changed, but I know why. I accepted, without my even realizing it, that you had nothing to do with Kanan. That your eyes and hair didn't have to be the color of her blood. They could be... I don't know... the sunset, or passionfruit, or roses. Ketchup, even." We both laugh at that. "Anything but her blood. Or, better still... they could be simply what they are. Why do you have to look like anything, or remind anyone of anything? Why not call this--" he seizes a strand of my bangs and runs his fingers through it "--or this--" the hand moved, stroking the thumb just underneath my left eye "--'Gojyo red'?"

"'Cuz it would sound shitty on a Crayola."

He's laughing. And... and it's real. Thank you, father God and sonny Jesus. You gave me someone who can make me feel like a little spatter of blood beneath the heels of a youkai army, yes... but he can make me feel like I just beat Kanzeon Bosatsu arm-wrestling. Like I could eat the world.

Something which I have learned about Hakkai: he is utterly unpredictable. It's the typical, routine way he does things that makes him that way: you never expect it when he shifts gears, from Swindler, to Caregiver, to Friend, to... to...

So when his features change from amusement to intense thought, I don't think much of it, beyond the usual flicker of surprise. He shifts faster than Proteus. But he leans forward, and--

--and everything is lost, the world implodes. There is no West. There is no love-nowhere god-thing egging us on. No droopy-eyed heretic monks and no dumbass apes. Just... him. His hands on my shoulders. His lips. His kiss.

I immediately forget what women are.

I reach around, place one hand on his shoulderblade, pull him as close as I think he'd allow. He's still sitting up on the edge of the bed, I'm still kicked back on my pillows. We're only touching at his hands and at our mouths, but I can feel his body heat, so it doesn't matter. I want to suck it out of his body. I try to cloy it out with my tongue, and he makes a shuddering noise, and I can feel little goosebump nodes forming underneath my hands out of his moonlight skin. He tastes like some rich, heady wine. I wonder if he minds that I probably taste like an ashtray.

He breaks the kiss--no way in hell I could ever have done it. Smiles with dampened lips, his face flushed with blood. And he says, "We should go to bed. It's late."

Wait. You kiss somebody like you're trying to dig out their uvula, and you can bear to stop... and do nothing? Are you unhinged?! "Wha... Hakkai..." Oh, yeah, I'm real eloquent.

"The ink is indelible," he says cheerfully. I can see he's breathing hard, even if his beautiful voice is even. "We have long lives ahead of us... enough time to do everything."

He's getting up. The goddamned fucking son of a bitch IS GETTING UP AND LEAVING ME LIKE THIS.

"I could kill you."

"I doubt it." He takes the few steps to his bed.

"You have no libido."

"Oh, I have a libido. I also have restraint."

"Why restrain yourself in something like this?"

"Moderation in all things, Gojyo." He creeps under his bedsheets. "It leads to a healthy life."

"What about moderation in moderation?"

Laughter. "Good night, Gojyo."

"You are evil. A cruel, wicked, malicious incubus. I love you."

"I love you, too," he says wistfully. "Good night."

"G'night," I grumble.

I kick back, and stare at the ceiling for a long time after I hear his breathing turn into the regular purring of sleep. I'm afraid to sleep. I don't want more visions of Hakkai driving a dagger through me. And I want to think about what we said. If he knew I wasn't joking. And whether he wasn't joking, too. And what kind of beautiful disaster we might have started with that hell of a kiss. I feel like this has all been another dream--weird and lovely at parts, but unreal. I don't know.

What the hell. I close my eyes.

He's right. Whatever we've started, we've got the rest of our lives to figure it out.

~Owari~

~AFTER: Um... yeah. Most of this was written while incoherent. Hope it wasn't too bad. I can't remember what I wrote.~


End file.
